What Changes Everything Page 3

  Zarlasht did not cry during this small speech, but her eyes were tight with an anguish that seemed so personal Todd felt sure she was speaking of herself, not a cousin. His natural impulse was to reach to squeeze her hand, but he knew this would violate all kinds of cultural protocol. He looked out the window for a minute instead, and then turned back. "I"m so sorry about all this, Zarlasht. But why come to me?"

  "Because I know your reputation," Zarlasht said. "I think if you summon Haji Mulak, and you mention the name of my... my cousin's husband, it might make a difference. Say you want to know about the case of Hamid, his wife and daughter."

  Todd smiled. "I fear your confidence in my reach is unrealistic."

  "I don"t think so. They talk about how you go to see the refugee camps, and how more food and doctor visits follow." Zarlasht paused, then spoke in a slightly softer voice. "And I have nowhere else to go."

  That sentence hung in the silent room for a moment, sucking out its air. Todd glanced briefly at Amin, whose eyes carried a clear warning. "Give me a few days," he told Zarlasht.

  "Let me see if I can help. Come back Wednesday."

  "Tashakor," she said, putting her right hand to her chest. "Ma salaam."

  She barely looked at Amin as she left, and no sooner had she walked from the building than Amin began to argue. "This is not your business, Mr. Todd. It is a local affair. To interfere in this matter is not only useless, but perilous. She must know this. So I wonder why she comes to you."

  Though Amin was a private man, Todd had heard something of his past, enough to reinforce his trust of Amin"s political instincts. As a teenager, Amin had waited on Najibullah while the ousted president was held in the UN mission. With the Taliban takeover, he"d fled over the mountains to Pakistan, joining other refugees. Eventually he got a scholarship to be educated in the States, and then returned to Afghanistan. He had a wife, three daughters and a son who lived outside Kabul, and who he saw only at week"s end, leaving his brother to look after them day-to-day. Amin believed the best future for Afghanistan lay in an alliance with America, but he also believed Americans were blind to Afghan cultural nuances, failing to understand how telling someone what they wanted to hear had become a survival skill, and how quickly and violently apparently seamless alliances could be shattered.

  Todd generally followed Amin"s advice; in fact, he wasn"t sure he"d ever before resisted this insistent an argument. But Amin was all logic and reason, lists of pros and cons, risks to be considered, unlikely gains to be weighed. Todd knew all that; he knew what was allowed here, what wasn"t, and still in these last of his remaining days on the job, he wondered about the advantages of simply speaking out, trying to do the right thing. He knew better than to express that aloud; Amin would invoke cultural differences and surely call him naïve besides.

  From a half-block away, Todd could see a longer-than-usual line at the ice cream stand,

  jammed not with the children who generally gathered there—even Churagh had given up trailing him—but with men, maybe a dozen. Odd; he wondered about it for a moment. Outside the enclosed marketplace, crowds were rare. Fear of suicide bombers always rumbled in the subconscious, and beyond that, of course, a group of any size drew the unwelcome attention of passing troops, whether Afghan or foreign.

  He quickly dismissed his worry as paranoia—this was ice cream he was talking about— and joined the back of the line. He raised a hand to the two men dressed in long white over-shirts and loose pants who dished the ice cream into cups on a table topped with a bright red, plastic sheet. By this time, the vendors knew Todd by sight and generally greeted him with big smiles. Sometimes he ate his ice cream right there in front of the stand, chatting with simple words, pretending for a moment he belonged and could linger casually. Now, though, they were too busy to acknowledge Todd, if they even saw him.

  He turned his attention to the bakery next door. In a room not much larger than a closet, three men tossed and patted dough and then submerged it in an open fire-pit to make bolani and nani Afghani. Sweat beaded at their temples. Their bodies moved as if in hypnotic dance.

  Something about the scene, though exotic, evoked home. He thought, then, of Clarissa; her name came into his mind and immediately he felt a tightening in his chest. He thought of her neck, and her long waist. He thought of her voice floating from the bathroom, the door open, but she unseen, bent over the sink or patting dry her face, telling him a story from her day. He always found that to be the most intimate of moments—to be with a woman in early evening, lying on a bed, listening to her voice coming from within the bathroom as she brushed or washed away the soil of the hours before. He closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead and saw a fleeting image of his wife. Clari, Clari, Clari.

  How had this amazing thing even happened to him, sharing a home again with a wife? He still wasn"t sure. He"d been widowed 22 years ago, losing Mariana when Ruby was only six. He"d never planned to marry again, first throwing all his energy into being a single parent, and then into his work. They"d met at a party. Clarissa was an urban historian teaching at Columbia. Whoever casually introduced them—he couldn"t remember that detail—noted that she"d recently finished a paper on historic housing patterns in Manhattan. He hadn"t been sure what that meant, but he"d immediately liked her smile, so he blundered forward, saying he"d noticed from his work with refugees how people arranged their living spaces even among war rubble, when you"d think shelter would be their only concern. A hierarchy developed, he"d gone on. Desirable housing locations arose in ways indiscernible to average outsiders, based on issues like position relative to the main entrance and the water supply as well as proximity to certain families once considered more powerful. Some tents, he said, were erected a few inches further from their neighbors than others; this sign of status was noted—and accepted—by the camp inhabitants. It all happened without any apparent discussion, so that even when no one had any money worth mentioning, socio-economic groupings occurred.

  As he was saying all this, talking almost without breathing just to keep her from walking away, he was really noticing her energy, her way of standing, the look in her eyes, her hair and, again, her smile.

  Less than a year later, they married. It felt crazy, unexpected and right. When they met, he was in the middle of the three-months-in/three-months-out rotations to Kabul and Islamabad. At first she"d been fine with it, but last year she"d offered—as if cupping her words in her hands and holding them out for him to see—that she wanted him to stop. She was careful so he knew it was still his choice. But he also knew what she thought. It had become too dangerous. The separations were too long; he had a home to return to, and they had a life to build, and too little time.

  So he"d agreed to the request she hadn"t quite voiced; he was doing his last rotation. He would celebrate his 50 birthday at home in three months, and then stay there through the next birthday, and the one after that.

  And she seemed glad, but she was edgy still, maybe even more so when he"d agreed to quit, thus tacitly acknowledging the dangers. He detected it in her voice when they"d spoken a couple of hours ago by phone, as he began his morning, as she headed into sleep.

  "There was a bombing in Islamabad a few hours ago," she"d said.

  "Yes, I heard."

  "Skip going there. Just come directly back."

  "I"ll be fine."

  She made a sound that indicated skepticism. "I feel like a military bride, Todd. And what are we doing still there? Really, at this point?"

  "Helping people who need it."

  "That sounds so damned sanctimonious," she murmured.

  "I"m sorry. But I have to finish up properly. For them. For me."

  The line went silent for a moment. "Have they named your replacement yet?" she asked.

  "Not yet."

  "But they will, yes? You won"t offer to stay on for one more rotation?"

  "No, Clari. No."

  She released a noisy sigh of air into the phone receiver. "Okay, then," she said. And she"
d tried—they both had—to lighten the conversation, to talk about smaller things. But it hadn"t worked; he felt the space gaping between them and knew she did too by her tone when she told him she loved him. He repeated it back, and they said goodbye.

  Now, he realized he wanted to meet Zarlasht"s needs because he couldn"t meet Clari"s. Illogical, of course. But it was as if showing kindness to Zarlasht could make up for hurting his wife, one in exchange for the other. He needed to consider Zarlasht independently. He would try, on the walk back, with his ice cream.

  But the line, Todd noticed, did not seem to be moving, though the vendors were bent over their sweet, cold tubs. "Ice cream is popular today," he said to the man in front of him, speaking in Pashto.

  The man turned toward Todd. He was about 25 years old. He wore a blue-gray turban and a brown vest over his salwar kameez and his eyebrows were unusually thick, like angry storm clouds hovering over his eyes. "It is the best ice cream in Kabul," he said in a way that seemed too serious, so weighted that Todd grinned, thinking for a second he must be kidding.

  Then the man turned abruptly away, leaving Todd to stare up at the high, teasing blue of the sky and think about how Afghanistan, even after all these years, had remained just beyond his reach of comprehension. While this concerned him occasionally, it also inspired him and was, in fact, something he loved: the rich, unknowable quality of living here that made his own life feel so much more consequential. A rush of gratitude flooded him, warming his stomach, making him smile faintly. And this was exactly the expression on his face at the moment of the improbable crack of thunder that preceded the dropping of two glass ice cream cups, and then the silence.

  Danil, September 4th

  High clouds, a distant rumble. A shout-out from a storm on the approach tonight, a summer storm pushing its way into the crowded Brooklyn streets from beyond some border, like an audacious illegal immigrant or a country girl thumbing her nose at the pretensions of civilization. Danil had maybe half an hour before it broke, and he planned to use the minutes well. His right arm blurred as he shook the can so energetically it made his whole body bounce. If some half-sleeper a few stories above the street in the Albany House II projects were to pause on the way to the toilet, bladder full, eyes bleary, and glance out his apartment window to the empty lot below, Danil would seem an unlikely dancer responding to absent music, a drunk or whackjob ripe for the Kingsboro Psychiatric Center. The can"s rattling magnified in the night air, resounding off the concrete around him. The corner of Bergen and Albany remained sunk into post-midnight somnolence, the darkness gobbling up noise and movement and regurgitating them as indistinct fragments of dreams. In this space of relative obscurity, he began.

  As if in a private ritual of nightly prayer, Danil"s holy paint met the sanctified wall. He moved his arm in graceful waves. After several minutes, he lowered the spray can to his side and then touched a corner of the paint with the tip of his left baby finger to test for dryness. He pulled off the paper, refolded it quickly, and extracted the next layer of stencil from where he"d stashed it under a parked car. With painter"s tape, he put the new cutout in place, holding his flashlight in

  his mouth so he could see to line it up properly.

  As he worked, he sang "Mr. Tambourine Man" softly, just loud enough to make the back of his mouth vibrate Dylan had been Danil"s quirky brother Piotr"s favorite singer, and just a few weeks ago, Danil had heard that song covered by a gutter punk band whose name he couldn"t remember in the Rock Star Bar under the Williamsburg Bridge. A dive with a great view of the span over the East River, a neon air hockey table, and two carved ship figureheads that hung above the liquor shelves, the bar was an odd place peeled off an earlier, rougher time; Danil liked it mainly because of the layers of scrawled tags that covered every inch of the bathroom, which was often where people gathered to talk, smoke, share drugs. And when the band of forgotten name performed, the Dylan song was etched onto the night like a Sunday choir"s hymn by a rope of a man with tattoos running up both arms. The singer forewent the harmonica and his voice was raspier than Dylan"s but it made Danil wish he could call Piotr. And it planted in his brain lyrics perfect for a street artist hoping to be immune to the night.

  Danil killed the flashlight, dug in his backpack for the can of white and silenced himself in concentration. This was the most important coat, the detail layer, full of fine cuts. It would take him a few minutes longer than the others, but it was manageable, assuming no one came strolling down the street. In this neighborhood at this hour, he was less worried about being arrested than being jumped.

  As he moved the can back and forth, he felt awake to the blood flowing in his arms, to the white paint as it spewed out, and to the goose-bump quality of the brick wall coated with a thin, patchy layer of cement. This is what it meant to be alive. Near the edges of the paper, he shortened his swing to avoid over-spray. His mind was doing double duty, checking the coverage while listening so intently for any unusual street noise that he imagined his ears turned inside out. He glanced over his shoulder and then turned back to the wall, conscious of the cool night air sailing over his arms.

  Danil was 31, too old for vandalism, maybe too old for all this shit, even in the name of protest art. But nothing beat the feeling he got when painting the street. Only then did he feel light, an organic part of the world around him, and yet disconnected from the dark thoughts of Piotr or his mother. Piotr, younger and so much more talented than Danil, had been drawn to bugs and small creatures, a collector of butterfly wings and ladybug shells, and such an easy target for grade-school thugs. Where the older brother was mild, the younger veered all the way to timid, and bullies sensed this. "It"s your job to look after him," their mother used to tell Danil. "You are four years older, and so much stronger, and not so dreamy. You"ve got to take care of him when I"m not there."

  And he had, for years. Though he was thin and quiet, Danil didn"t mind using his fists against anyone who tried to torment his brother. When they were both in high school, Piotr started calling him a "golden toad," a reference picked up from one of the nature magazines he loved. He said he meant that Danil might appear gentle but could turn aggressor when needed. Danil always laughed and said anyone who talked about golden toads and ladybug elytras and brush-footed butterflies clearly needed a protector. Still, somehow it was mild Piotr who had been persuaded after a single year at college to go help fight a war, some damn unfathomable idealism kicking in. And somehow it was Danil who found that fight foolish.

  These days their mother, who ran her used bookstore at the edge of Cleveland, Ohio, had grown thick with refusal, dodging the truth about Piotr and writing long letters to Danil. One of the last ones included a snapshot, tattered at the lower left corner. "A photo of me and my two boys. Can you tell me why…" When Danil and his mother were together, her confusion deepened and their sorrows seemed to multiply. When they were together, they could neither deny Piotr"s absence nor ignore the distance left between them by his death. So Danil never answered the letters, never called home anymore.

  Instead he stenciled on crumbling brick walls of deserted buildings, on rusting metal factory doors, and once on the side of a van abandoned in an empty lot. While he was working on the sketches, cutting the stencils, he thought about Piotr. He remembered some things, he realized others about his brother. But while he was actually doing the work in the middle of some half-blind night, the anguish finally settled. There was no past, no future to concern him, only here and now, and him alive, the sound of paint misting from an upright can.

  When he finished with the white, he waited again, testing for dryness. Then he quickly removed the paper and backed up next to an abandoned car seat. He checked the street to his right and left—still empty—before turning on his flashlight.

  Sometimes he practiced on one wall in his rundown studio apartment. He"d tried out this stencil there, painting over the remnants of other projects, a trial run to make sure the layers came together as he"d hoped. He"
d felt fine enough about the results. But the outcome always looked different on location. When he planned it right, the environment—fading tags on marred cement walls, straggly weeds fringing tall buildings—multiplied the meaning of the image. Now, something nearing satisfaction swept through Danil"s body, not pride exactly but a kind of certainty that this work was deeply moral. Ephemeral art, echoing ephemeral life, and randomly finding its temporary partners.

  He thought of people seeing the piece in the morning as they headed into the bodega on the corner or the high school across the street. He imagined a couple kids sitting on the grounded bench seat, facing the wall, studying his work, really seeing it: a life-sized woman with a serious expression, dancing on top of an oversized clenched fist, and wearing a black dress with red teardrops falling from the hem.

  His brother"s body arrived home with a medal attached, but Piotr was not a war hero, not in any traditional sense. Instead he"d become a victim of a creative effort to rewrite the present. To sanitize it. So Danil had become a Reminderer; he considered it his unpaid, untitled job. Dear passerby, plugged into your smart phone, lost in one form of oblivion or another: if you focus on a middle distance, you will remember. Ravenous war is upon us still.